Voices of resilience : female school principals, leadership skills, and decision-making techniques

Ph.D.Abstract: This research emanates from two intractable features of South Africa’s educational landscape: chronically under-performing schools, and gender asymmetry in school leadership. With the majority of South African schools underperforming, there is a compelling need to unlock and support leadership talent in South African schools by widening the talent pool. While women represent the majority of teachers in South African classrooms, they remain strikingly under-represented at school leadership level. Limited empirical research is available on the perspectives of in-service female school leaders in South Africa, particularly in former homeland areas such as KaNgwane, the site of this study. This study focuses on these female principals’ perspectives, shedding light on their life narratives and career trajectories. The voices and lived experiences of female principals are the principle focus areas of this study. The problem question for this research was the following: What can be learned from an analysis of the first-hand perspectives and reflections of in-service female school principals in South Africa, as they recount their life narratives and resilience mechanisms within their career trajectories? The sub-questions were the following: (a) How do the participants define and frame their leadership skills, both practically and psychologically; (b) Which decision-making techniques did the participants utilise during their promotion journeys; and (c) How can resilience factors in the principalship journey be expressed in a framework that can be imparted to prospective principals? An interdisciplinary theoretical framework was used to guide the interpretation of the participants’ perspectives, using change theory, the ethics of care, and resilience psychology. In-depth insights and rich data were provided by narrative analysis as the research methodology. Three types of data were collected, analysed and integrated: spoken (individual and focus group interviews), visual (photographs), and written (questionnaires). Themes that surfaced as patterns from the multi-layered data are grouped in the following four major categories: (1) Formative experiences: the early years of the fifteen female participants in abject poverty under apartheid; (2) Accumulative experiences: teaching career trajectories; (3) Pinnacle experiences: the..